Misc

In my previous role as a librarian, I always felt like research was the main area where I had complete control. I could make the choices that I wanted to make without having to get them approved by my manager. However, other aspects of my role, especially within the institution were heavily managed Prevention of burnout and the fear of burnout became a reason to keep me from taking on work that was meaningful and interesting to me. In my view, this was specifically an reaction to a previous departure that was attributed to burnout. The irony is that I left after 3 and a half years, not because of burnout but because there was no longer room for me to grow. It seems, to me at least, that there has been a somewhat recent shift in libraries away from grit, resilience, and the idea of doing more with less to the idea of doing less with less. I think the prevalence of sessions about workload at this conference actually speak to that shift. However, one of my concerns is that as we do less with less, we resist innovation and return to the “tried and true.” For example, instead of boldly abandoning the one-shot and focusing on faculty development, we might lean in entirely to the one-shot. In a way, it seems easy because it’s well-known and has been done. This might be seen as doing less with less by avoiding doing anything new and sticking to our “bread and butter.” The challenge that I see here is that I don’t think the majority of librarians find one-shots exhilarating, but exhausting. In fact, in talking with librarians, so many discuss one-shots in relation to a machine or a factory. It’s not fulfilling work. As we think about workloads and doing less with less, I think we need to consider meaningful and engaging work, and library managers and leaders need to work with librarians to decide what they give up and what a minimum viable service model looks like. I think too frequently, managers make decision to do less with less, and then drop the interesting work they’re doing or resist proposals for innovation because there isn’t capacity. In some cases, this may make sense. However, in other cases, there may be opportunities to change our work to be more efficient. For example, abandoning one shot library instruction in favor of faculty and TA development around information literacy provides an opportunity for deeper, more meaningful instruction while potentially requiring less capacity. However, if we consider one shot instruction as a baseline or a requirement for library instruction, and then add teach-the-teacher approaches on top, it obviously creates more work and stretches capacity. In this sense, innovation is simply additional work rather than replacing work or making work more efficient. We see this in other library instruction as well, such as multiple engagement with the same class or embedded librarianship, which might be great and meaningful models of teaching but require more and more work.

minimal and optimal